Author Shelley Wood’s new book reminds us long before the Kardashians craze was the Quintland zoo GlobeArts
feels like a quaint cultural relic, the Kardashians are the rulers of a new world order, and bloggers in the thousands make entire livings documenting the mundanities of family life, it’s hard to fathom quite how all-pop-culture-consuming a phenom the Dionne sisters were nearly 90 years ago.
. Written as a scrapbook of sorts, interspersed with real newspapers articles from the period and fictional letters between characters, the narrative spine of this story is the diary of Emma Trimpany, a teenager created by Wood, who becomes one of the quintuplets’ primary caretakers. At first, this particular perspective is a source of frustration. While Emma labours quietly in the nursery, her accounts full of diaper changes, feeding schedules and the antics of the girls, much of the capital-A action is happening off stage, reported as hearsay or overheard conversations. This is not to say that the inner workings of early childhood are not worth writing about, never-before-seen multiples or not.
As I intimated earlier, this is a novel that will require a little tenacity in the first half, mostly depending on whether or not you find Emma herself compelling enough a narrator, if her own comparably mundane coming-of-age in this bizarre context is interesting enough to compete with the verging-on-grotesque zoo that is the quints’ life. It’s actually a question Emma even addresses herself, at one point noting, “I’m a note in the margin of someone else’s story.
Ultimately, however, telling this story from Emma’s perspective pays off as a narrative strategy. This device creates room for ambiguity. The reader is given an observation, often incomplete and always through the lens of immaturity, and left to flesh out their own conclusions about the muddied motivations of almost everyone in this heartbreaking story.
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